African American Studies Commons^™

Forest City Memories: A Comprehensive Look At Black History In London Ontario, Isaac Edward Mapp

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The way we record history and reflect on the events of the past often shows the present foundation a community stands on to be socially sustainable and to look toward the future with better clarity. The city of London’s history is some of the richest in Ontario, and the heroism surrounding this history is proudly planted throughout the nooks and crannies of London and beyond. Anyone walking through Victoria Park will notice the Holy Roller tank which fought on D-Day and beyond, or the war memorial featuring a proud and rigid soldier and canons to celebrate Victoria Park and London’s …

"I Need To Fight The Power, But I Need That New Ferrari": Conspicuous Consumption, New-School Hip-Hop And "The New Rock & Roll", Emmett H. Robinson Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

2017 marked the year in which hip-hop officially became the most listened-to genre in the United States. This thesis explores hip-hop music’s rise to its now-hegemonic position within the music industry, seeking to provide insight into the increasingly popular sentiment that hip-hop is “the new rock & roll”. The “new-school” hip-hop artists of the last six years or so have also been the subject of widespread critical disdain, especially for their heightened degree of emphasis on conspicuous consumption. This study will track hip-hop’s ascent from the mid-1980s through to its current position as both a political vehicle and a commercial …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

'Fought The Good Fight, Finished My Course': George Dixon Amid The Rising Tide Of Jim Crow America, Jason A. Winders

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fought the Good Fight, Finished My Course explores the forces that fueled the ascension of Canadian-born, Boston-raised boxer George Dixon (1870-1908) from a remote racial enclave in Nova Scotia to the heights of multi-continent fame during a suffocating era for black advancement, and how those same forces failed to prevent his early, tragic demise.

Dixon parlayed an early passion for boxing into a career as a pioneering world champion, barnstormer, showman and ambassador for a sport just finding its place in North American culture in the 1880s/1890s. At 20, he became the World Bantamweight Champion in 1890 – the first …

Unmasking The Protester: The Meanings And Myths Of Collective Civil Resistance Movements In African American And Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction, Agnieszka Herra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My contention is that the narrative framework of social movements, especially the ones deemed “successful” such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Polish Solidarity Movement, reflects unity and collectivity within collective memory. During the period of the movements’ duration, this provides a clear rhetorical purpose: to give the appearance of unity in order to give effective voice to the demands. I argue that the voices that did not fit into the collective movements emerge subsequently to question this monologic language in literary form. This dissertation uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language to argue that novels in the postresistance …